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'reputation' points lowered, whole graph affected

Hi,

For a while now I've noticed that my reputation points are intermittently being lowered, sometimes by only 12 or 24 points but today it was 54.

In my case it also translates down the graph, so that the previous days' total points amount is lowered by the same amount, not just the day that it happened, keeping the day totals on the graph, always the same points distance apart.

Should this be happening or should only the day on which the points are lowered be the only one to change?

As an aside the only reason that I can see for losing the 54 points today is that the Answer accepted count has gone down 1, so I suppose Answer unaccepted + 2 undo upvotes somewhere = 54 points. I don't know, as undo upvotes are not shown in Activity).

It may have happened here in this question/answer. The answer is shown as unaccepted 3 days ago (see bottom image) and no points were deducted then and it is not showing up in Activity as unaccepted and it still shows up as the Chosen Solution??

Today I received an email from Ifixit Meta regarding my question. It states that 2 weeks have gone by since I posted with no response. Unless I am mistaken I originally posted the question only 5 days ago. I realize that as I get older time goes past more quickly but...

Here is the opening quote from the email.

"Hi jayeff,

One of your questions has gone two weeks without any answers.

Updating your question with more information might help the community solve your problem.....

It dropped 12 pts all the way down again yesterday 23.2.17 (my time +8.00 GMT) but don't know why.

My 200 pts/day count seems to commence at 1500 hrs AWST everyday, presumably when your servers do their updates. Is it done at 0200 hrs MT?

Noticed the last points change down seemed to have occurred at 1500 hrs local or close to it as I wasn't really watching for it, just noticed it around that time. Understandable if servers update some info at this time

Will keep you informed if I can spot any thing else that may be of help.

It just dropped 12 pts again,(27.02.2017) this time after the 200 pts/day max was reached (+14 pts was the last pts addition at 2042 hrs local, as that made the 200 pts I suppose).

As it happened sometime between 2042-2200 hrs local (I noticed the drop at 2159 hrs local), it doesn't appear to be associated with the time when I think that my 200 pts/day count is reset i.e. 1500 hrs local

Hey Jayeff, we're looking into it, but so far we haven't been able to reproduce =T We may have some issues with moderation actions affecting rep (spam users being banned etc), which might mean the drop in rep is "legit" we don't want to keep counting "bad" actions. However, if we find out our math is wrong and we owe you rep, we'll definitely be correcting the count to give your rep back! =)

Not really a problem for me if points are being deducted. Points are nice but are not my 'raison d'être' to be on Ifixit. I was just wondering why every day on the whole graph was affected by the same amount and not just the day on which it occurred.

I did read Chris's post and as far as I can make out it does but as I am not sure how the "Delta" is arrived at I'm not certain. The count values seem to be right.

At first I thought that the delta value was achieved by simply multiplying the upvote or Answer accepted count by their value i.e. Post was voted up Delta = Post count x 12 and Answer accepted Delta = Answer count x 30 but this doesn't work because I've noticed that when nearing the daily 200 point cutoff mark you are only credited with the difference between the 200 points and where you are at the time (if close to 200 points), if a post was voted up or answer accepted. e.g. if on 192 points for the day and an answer was voted up within the time period, then you only get 8 points from a possible 12 or only 8 points from a possible 30 if the answer was accepted.

This is OK by me but it makes it a bit hard to track whether the count/Delta figures are right. I can only look at the count value to see whether it has gone up or down as I don't know if the delta goes down by the same amount as it went up. When an Answer accepted is 'unaccepted' does the delta go down by 30 points even though it might have gone up by only 8 originally for example.

Just lost another 30 pts, but this time I have a clue as to what is happening.

One of my answers was unaccepted but there is no notice of this given in my activity area or in my notifications area. In Reputation Breakdown the Answer count went down by 1 and the answer delta went down by 30 pts.

This is the question/answer that it happened on. The answer was accepted on 10/4/2017 (local time) and was unaccepted on 11/4/2017 at 2112hrs local.

The answer accepted notification is still in my notifications area but the answer accepted notice (with the +30 pts) has gone from my activity area leaving only the original answer upvote that occurred with the answer accepted (funny the time shown must be the server time because I know that it was accepted at a different time to what is shown and it was definitely not 0225 hrs local).

So I'm guessing that when answers are unaccepted, the following occurs:

1. There is no notice about this given in the activity or notifications area.

2. In the "Subscribed Answers" section it does show up as Answer Unaccepted, but you have to go looking for it. It doesn't top the list as a new entry when it occurs. The original Answer accepted green box is removed, Answer unaccepted is written under the questioner's avatar and the date/time entry is amended with the time that the Answer unaccepted event occurred

3. The question's original Answer Accepted entry into the activity area is deleted, but it remains in the notifications area.

It would be nice if an Answer unaccepted entry was also placed into the activity area or that it topped the list in the Subscribed Answers section when it occurred so that at least there is some awareness of what is happening.

As yet I don't know what happens with a downvote entry as with this particular question it was only unaccepted and not downvoted.

@cdcline Looks like Jayeff found an avenue of investigation. Do we keep track of this? I know there are a ton of user actions that don't necessarily need to get piled in Activity, but as long as the numbers add up and there's some kind of transparency?

1 Answer

I'm not sure this is an actual bug, it's just that that graph isn't a very accurate representation of what your reputation was at a specific spot.

While we record exactly what second you did a reputation action, when graph the data, we have to approximate the times that things happen because there are too many data points for the extremely active users. We end up grouping by day and storing it separately.

This means, when you look at the graph, there can be some odd spots to it. We're approximating things so that we can show you a pretty picture but to do it quickly there's some tradeoffs.

What numbers we do really pay attention to are the "Reputation Breakdown"

Those should always be an accurate representation of what we think your reputation should be.

Right now it looks like things are all correct. Your graph shows the correct rep, your sidebar show the correct total and the breakdown adds everything up.

You're totally correct that the graph isn't always showing the correct values for the past 24 hours b/c we have to approximate things. I'd guess we might have a bug with timezones (its really, really hard to do right) and we don't always get yesterday's and today's reputation events quite merged, which causes some different numbers depending on what time you look at it.

On the plus side, we seem to be tracking and totally the reputation correctly outside of that graph. It's a bug but I'm pretty sure it's not actually changing anyone's reputation, it's just we aren't able to render the graph super accurately.